A long journey in Silicon Valley

Daily Archives: September 26, 2006

I spoke on a panel at SaaScon today and in thinking over the comments I achieved clarity on a couple of points:

1) When someone says “SaaS” it can mean a lot of things depending on their perspective. There is the delivery model as represented by multi-tenant hosted, SOA as in architecture, web services as the more generic variant of SOA, and IT’s shared services idea.

2) If all we end up doing is rewriting existing apps in SOA I will be profoundly disappointed. However, in many of these discussions that is exactly the subtext, how new web services apps will displace legacy client/server. At some point we need to get beyond this and imagine a scenario where new innovative apps will be built that disrupt the status quo, and in reality they are very unlikely to come from the incumbent vendors.

3) Incumbents do have a built in advantage, the markets for major enterprise apps have been saturated and solidified.

4) Let’s think about how we grow markets by bringing new customer groups into the tent rather than just redefining where the seams are drawn.

5) In my mind the most exciting aspect of SaaS is the economic model that a light touch selling process enables. If anything, this is the critical enabler because it enables companies to target smaller niche markets and higher risk applications. Large vendors like Oracle and SAP can’t target micromarkets because their economic infrastructure demands that they go after large markets to feed the machine, and large markets or collections of moderately sized markets mean that they develop to the lowest common denominator. I spent a lot of years watching this unfold, in order to expand the addressable market you end up making a lot of compromises in the product roadmap…

Like this:

Instead of blaming security, the major carriers might want to look in the mirror to see the real problem. Who the hell wants to get on a flight when you are faced with 1) surly flight attendants, 2) crappy food bag of pretzels, 3) old airplanes, 4) no entertainment, 5) no network, and lastly 6) it’s ridiculously expensive. Oh yeah, I forgot to mention in-flight air quality that ends up making you sick.

Flying is a miserable experience on any major U.S. carrier, no wonder business travelers are staying at the office and using video conferencing and video chat. If carriers want more people to fly they might consider doing something other than making you pay more for service that is increasingly worse.

But the increase in air transportation security has had an impact. Fewer people are flying. The airlines don’t like to discuss this, but customer satisfaction, and travel, surveys show that people, especially business flyers (the most lucrative kind of passengers) are flying less.